This week’s Artdog Image of Interest:
Cultural exchange flows both ways, or it isn’t an exchange. In earlier posts this month, I’ve explored Japonisme in Europe, and the influence of Katsushika Hokusai’s prints on the French painter Paul Cézanne. Japanese art clearly changed the look of Western art in many ways.
But did Western art have any effect on the art of Asia? Indeed it did, and here is an example. Today, I’d like you to meet Tetsugoro Yorozu‘s Leaning Woman.
Tetsugoro was part of the Japanese Yōga (“Western-style”) art movement at the turn of the 20th Century. Although he died when he was only 41 (of tuberculosis), he was an influential painter in his day. Fascinated with Western-style art from an early age, he traveled to the US to study art, but had to return almost immediately to Japan, because of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake.
He experimented with a variety of Western styles, but he is best known for promoting Cubism in Japan. Tetsugoro’s Leaning Woman currently resides in the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, Japan.
No matter where they originate, exciting new ways of looking at the world will always beguile artists–no matter where they originate.
IMAGE: Many thanks to Wikipedia for the image of Leaning Woman.
